Concept Design
Software designed at the level of the ideas it asks its users to hold — the units of behaviour a person learns once and reuses everywhere — rather than at the level of features, screens, or endpoints.
The thing I keep coming back to, when something in a piece of software
suddenly clicks for someone, is how rarely the moment has anything
to do with the visible interface. Buttons, layouts, copy — these
matter, but they are usually not what is being learned. What is being
learned is a small, durable idea: that this app has a thing called a
Reminder, that a Reminder belongs to exactly one List, that a
List can be Shared and a Reminder cannot. Once that handful of
ideas lands, the user navigates screens she has never seen before and
is right more often than wrong.
TODO introduce concept design here.
The argument in one paragraph
Most software, in the way it is usually built, is described twice. There is the user-facing description — what the marketing site claims, what the help articles explain, what the user mutters to a colleague — and there is the implementation description, in code and schemas. Concept design proposes a third layer, sitting between the two and authoritative over both. A concept is named, has a stated purpose, has a small inventory of actions, and behaves the same way wherever it appears. The promise is that if the concepts are right, the screens write themselves and the code follows; if the concepts are wrong, no amount of UI polish or refactoring will rescue the product.
Why I find it useful
The first thing concept design gave me was a precise vocabulary for a complaint I had always had about feature lists. A feature is a marketing artefact; it is what gets announced. A concept is what the user has to internalise to use the feature without help. Two products with the same feature list can have wildly different concept loads, and the heavier one tends to lose, even if it is technically more powerful. Concept count — how many distinct ideas the user has to hold in order to be fluent — turns out to be a more honest measure of complexity than line count or screen count.
TODO the whole rest